“Because that’s how we compete with the AIs. If you didn’t take flow, you couldn’t think as well. If I didn’t use buffs, I couldn’t assemble heavy machinery. Without pills, we’re nothing. The bots and WAIs would win.”

She turned toward him and lowered her voice further. “Then what? If the Machinehood truly can stop all pill production, we’ll have no more dailies. Forget the work! We’ll have nothing to protect us from the biohackers. It’ll be the pandemic years all over again.”

“That was the forties,” Luis protested. “They didn’t even have pills back then, only drugs.”

“Almost forty million people died during that decade, and that was from naturally evolved super pathogens! Besides, my mother died three years ago from an engineered virus. Imagine how much worse it would be today if we couldn’t make vaccines in our kitchens.”

Luis’s expression softened. “You’re really worried about this?”

Nithya’s stomach clenched as she nodded. “They murdered people in plain sight of the world and left no trace. Who can do that, Luis?”

He shrugged. “Doesn’t it seem like a slow and stupid way to kill off humanity? If you’re an all-powerful AI, why not hack the nuclear launch codes or bring the space stations crashing down?” He shifted the pile of blox away from the kitchen so they could form bed frames. “Anyway, there’s no point worrying. We can’t do anything about this except live our lives. It’s up to people like Welga to catch the Machinehood.”

“Yes, but I can’t help it.” Nithya pressed her hands together and took several breaths. “You’re right. Back to practicalities. Can you make up the beds and get Carma settled? I should work a little more. I’ve been too distracted today.”

“Of course.” He kissed her on the cheek and moved to usher their daughter from the sofa for her bath.

Nithya took another flow and sat down in her alcove. She pulled up the Synaxel results from earlier in the day. She’d been play-testing a new diagnostic tool for the project. The game design came from another team member, but the specifics were hers. She’d used a previously solved problem to test her structure, but even that proved more tricky than anticipated. Neither she nor the gigsters who tried it had come close to the solution. Had she missed some essential parameter?

She combed through multiple internal reports. Synaxel’s databases had a reputation for comprehensiveness. A group of six funders made up its board of directors, creating one of the last remaining pill design firms. As the world’s workforce had decentralized, so too had the corporate structure of the first half of the century. The fewer the decision-makers, the faster they could react, and modern projects moved at electric speed.